The Collected Letters, Volume 15

DEAR MR. STRACHEY, — The head must evidently have belonged to some son of Adam who lived a good while ago, and went through strange vicissitudes
after burial. Though I doubt there is next to no chance of its ever having belonged to Cromwell, yet merely as an anatomical
specimen and envious “product of the arts” it seems well worth a journey to Camberwell, especially to such a courteous host's as Mr.———'s. Pray let my thanks be conveyed to him. I hope also to see your friend Mr. Gregory1 by and by. But at present I am too weakly with a dirty, sneaking sore throat, the fruit of easterly winds; and indeed, through
winter generally I am unequal to a night adventure so far as Camberwell. Perhaps Mr. ——— would see me some time by daylight on a Sunday or holiday? I should like
to look on this notable piece of Anak-Reality2 (supposing it to be only such), and hear what account it gives of itself. The history of poor Oliver, from his cradle to
his grave, and even beyond it, is such a mere mass of stupid fables as never, or hardly ever, elsewhere clustered themselves
round the memory of a great man. In other times and conditions he would have been sung of as a demigod, and here Tyburn gallows3 was in all ways the lot of him! It is really painful to consider such depth of sheer thick stupidity, and total want of sense
for the godlike in man is very sure to punish itself; as, alas! we find it now in these quack-ridden generations everywhere
too fatally doing. But the poor leather head at Camberwell is not to blame for much of this, surely. Let us leave it, therefore.

My wife is out of her cold, but hanging, as her wont is through winter, on the verge of another.

When your good mother approaches this country, I pray you give me notice.

You, I think, will be wise not to stir much out at present. I hope to see you again soon.

Ever truly yours,

T. CARLYLE.

My wife wants Mrs. Buller's address at Lady Louis's.4 I have settled with her that she shall write her letter, and that I will inclose it to you, with merely “Mrs. Buller” on
it, that you may do the needful.

1. Charles Hutton Gregory, identified by Strachey as “my old schoolfellow” who “told me that a friend of his, Mr. ——— by name,
wished me to inform Carlyle that he was in possession of the head of Oliver Cromwell, and invited him to go and see it.” After
the decapitation of Cromwell's exhumed body (see TC to EF, 29 Sept.), the head was placed on top of Westminster Hall, where it stayed till the 1680s, when it seems to have been blown down, picked up by a sentry, and sold. It finally came to Josiah Wilkinson, probably the
unnamed person in the letter. Eventually it was given to Sydney Sussex College, Cromwell's college at Cambridge, and buried
in 1960. See Antonia Fraser, Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973) 697–98. Strachey reports that TC never saw it.

2. The Anaks were a race of giants slaughtered by the Israelites; see Joshua 11:21.